Full disclosure to start. I am new-ish to IndyCar. The Formula 1 paddock has been my home for years and the Indianapolis 500 had always been a once-a-May appointment for me, the same way it is for most Americans who don’t otherwise follow open-wheel racing. This season is different. 2026 is the first year I have committed to watching every IndyCar race on the schedule, all 17 of them, from St. Pete in March to Nashville in September, and what I can report is that the passion is coming on faster than I expected. Not quite F1 level. Not yet. But every Sunday I sit down for a green flag, the gap closes a little. If you have never watched an IndyCar race in your life, if your motorsports diet has been pure Formula 1 and the occasional NASCAR highlight your uncle shows you on his phone at Thanksgiving, you have picked the right Sunday to walk in the door. Next Sunday, May 24, is the 110th running of the Indianapolis 500. The Greatest Spectacle in Racing. The single biggest one-day sporting event on the planet. Three hundred thousand fans inside a 2.5-mile rectangle of asphalt in central Indiana. Thirty-three cars in eleven rows of three abreast. Coverage starts at ten in the morning Eastern on FOX. You do not need to know the difference between a Dallara and a Datsun to get hooked by what is about to happen. You need to know roughly six things, and we are going to get through all of them, with my picks on the back end. This is going to be the most important race of the IndyCar season. So buckle up.
Start with the track. Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a 2.5-mile oval. Four corners, all left turns, all banked at a very modest nine degrees and twelve minutes. That is, by oval standards, almost flat. The straights are long. The Turn 1 entry is the most committing single piece of pavement in racing. The cars run flat out, throttle pinned, for nearly the entire lap, and they average somewhere north of 230 miles per hour for the four laps of qualifying. Two hundred and thirty miles per hour. That number is louder when you say it out loud. The fastest a Formula 1 car has ever been measured in a race weekend is 231.4 mph and that was Bottas at Mexico in 2016 on a downhill straight with a tow. These IndyCar machines clock 232 on a lap average on a flat oval, four times in a row, no aero help from a car in front, just the driver and the wall fifteen feet to his right. That’s what you’re about to watch. Five hundred miles of it. Two hundred laps. From green flag to checkered, roughly three hours of nothing but commitment.
There is exactly one man in this field who can claim he’s been the fastest of all 33 of them this past weekend, and his name is Alex Palou. He won the pole on Sunday with a four-lap average of 232.248 miles per hour in the No. 10 Chip Ganassi Racing Honda. It is his second career Indy 500 pole. He is the defending Indianapolis 500 winner from last May. He is the three-time defending NTT IndyCar Series champion, and a four-time IndyCar champion at the age of 28. He led the championship standings by 27 points coming into this race for the fourth straight year. Read those numbers again. Three straight titles. A pole. A defense. A double-digit points lead. The man is, right now, the most dominant active driver in any open-wheel series in the world, and that includes the kid from Bologna currently running the table in Formula 1. If you were going to walk into this thing knowing one name, that name is Palou.
But here is the trick of the Indy 500, and this is the first thing your friend who has been watching since the Foyt era is going to tell you: the pole sitter rarely wins this race. In 109 prior runnings, the pole sitter has crossed the line first roughly 21 times, fewer than one in five, and the last man to do it from pole was Simon Pagenaud back in 2019. The reason is simple and it is the entire personality of the race. You are running at 230 miles per hour. Two cars together in a draft cut through the air more efficiently than one. The follower gets an effective 4 to 6 mph speed advantage out of clean air, which means the man in second can pull alongside the man in first on the long straights and use that closure rate to pick him off in Turn 1. So pole position is the best seat in the house for the first thirty seconds. After that, the race breaks into shifting two-car packs and three-car packs and twelve-car packs, and the man who wins is usually the man who arrives at the right pack at the right time on the right tires, not the man who started at the front. The lead changes 30, 40, 50 times in a typical Indy 500. Last year Palou won having led just 14 of 200 laps. The year before, Newgarden won leading exactly two laps. Two. You don’t lead from green to checkered at Indianapolis. You manage the chaos, and you arrive when the chaos hands you a window.
Sitting on the front row next to Palou is Alexander Rossi in the No. 20 Java House Chevrolet of Ed Carpenter Racing, at 231.990 mph. This is the storybook entry of the entire weekend. Rossi won the 2016 Indianapolis 500 as a 24-year-old rookie, on fuel mileage, in a year nobody was expecting him to do anything. Ten years on, almost to the day, he is back on the front row, having spent the back half of his late 20s grinding through a slow Andretti era that everyone agreed had wasted his prime. ECR signed him for 2025 and he came alive. He is fast on ovals. He has won this race once already, which is one more than 31 of the 33 starters can say. Plant the flag. He is on the podium next Sunday. Whether he beats Palou is a different conversation, but he is one of the three names on the rostrum when the milk gets poured. More on the milk in a minute.
Outside the front row, completing the first row of three, is David Malukas in the No. 12 Verizon Chevrolet of Team Penske at 231.877 mph. Malukas’s career has been the strangest in IndyCar over the last three years. He was poached by Arrow McLaren before the 2024 season, then wrecked his mountain bike, then broke his wrist, then lost the McLaren seat, then landed at A.J. Foyt Racing for 2025, then drove the wheels off it well enough that Penske signed him to replace Will Power in 2026 after the Penske scandal blew the entire 2025 driver lineup into orbit. He is starting his first Indy 500 in Penske machinery from the third spot on the grid. The Penske organization has won 19 Indianapolis 500s. The most of any team. That is not nothing.
Now the Penske scandal, because if you walked in cold this is the part you missed. At qualifying for the 2025 Indianapolis 500, Penske was caught with modified rear attenuators on its cars. Race control parked them at the back. The fallout cost team president Tim Cindric his job, took down two other executives, dropped a public relations grenade on Roger Penske personally, and triggered a year of soul-searching for an organization that is also, by quirk of capitalism, the owner of Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the operator of the IndyCar Series itself. The fix that came out of it is genuinely radical. As of January 2026 there is a new entity called IndyCar Officiating, Inc., independently governed by a three-person board (Ray Evernham, the Ford executive Raj Nair, and the FIA’s Ronan Morgan), with Scot Elkins as managing director. Race control, technical inspection, and rule enforcement are now formally separated from Penske Entertainment. It is the cleanest answer the sport could have given to a conflict-of-interest question that had been gnawing at the paddock for a decade. And here’s the kicker. Tim Cindric, fired in 2025 in the most public disgrace of his career, returned to Team Penske in January 2026 as Scott McLaughlin’s race strategist. Penske brought him back. Inside the same building. Just not in charge of the team anymore. McLaughlin starts ninth on Sunday. Cindric will be the voice in his ear at every pit window. Watch how that radio sounds when McLaughlin needs a call on lap 162.
The qualifying weekend also produced a fresh black eye for the series. Caio Collet, the Foyt rookie who had originally qualified tenth, and Jack Harvey at Dreyer & Reinbold, were both disqualified after post-session inspections turned up modifications to the energy management systems on their cars. Both will start at the back of the grid. In the new world of IndyCar Officiating Inc., that call was made by people who do not work for Roger Penske. That is the entire point of the rebuild, and it played out in real time over the weekend. The paddock noticed.
The other piece of 2026 that the new viewer should understand is the hybrid. Year two of it, technically. IndyCar introduced a hybrid energy recovery system midway through 2024 and ran the full 2025 season with it. This year the cars carry the same basic kit (a small electric motor between the engine and gearbox, an energy store packed behind the driver’s head, regen on braking and on coasting), but the rules around when and how you can deploy that energy have been completely rewritten for 2026. Last year’s “trickle deploy” tactic, where teams would dribble out hybrid power across an entire lap to gain a small constant edge, has been outlawed. The series jacked up the minimum deployment thresholds. Now you have to use the hybrid in deliberate bursts. Sixty horsepower at the push of a button, gone in a couple of seconds, then you have to harvest it back. On top of that, the traditional push-to-pass system gives drivers another 60 horsepower from increased turbo boost, on a limited time budget across the race, available at all times once the field is green. You are about to watch two separate, overlapping, finite power-boost systems being managed by 33 drivers across 200 laps. The men who get this right will pass each other. The men who get it wrong will spend half the race regenerating instead of attacking. This is going to be visible on the broadcast. Pay attention to which cars surge on the back straight and which ones are bleeding speed.
The cast of characters you should know beyond the front row reads like this. Felix Rosenqvist starts fourth in the No. 60 SiriusXM Honda for Meyer Shank Racing, and he was the man of the weekend through practice, posting 233+ mph laps on Fast Friday before settling for fourth in qualifying. Santino Ferrucci starts fifth for Foyt, a driver who has finished top six in five of his last seven Indy 500 starts and is the most consistently underrated runner at this track. Pato O’Ward starts sixth in the No. 5 Arrow McLaren, the Mexican fan favorite who has been within shouting distance of an Indy 500 win in three different runnings and has nothing to show for it yet. Scott Dixon starts eleventh for Ganassi, the six-time series champion, the man who has run more Indianapolis 500 laps than any driver in this field, the one who is always there when the bottle gets opened. Scott McLaughlin starts ninth for Penske, the three-time Australian Supercars champion turned IndyCar regular, with Cindric on the radio. Helio Castroneves starts fifteenth in the No. 06 Cleveland-Cliffs Honda for Meyer Shank, age 51, attempting to become the first man in history to win the Indianapolis 500 five times. Ed Carpenter starts fourteenth, in his 23rd consecutive Indy 500, the only owner-driver left in the series.
Then the Europeans. Mick Schumacher, last seen losing a Haas Formula 1 seat in 2022, starts 28th in the No. 47 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Honda. This is his first Indianapolis 500. His first oval was at Homestead in February. He completed 97 laps in a Dallara-on-banking before this season. Dennis Hauger, the 2025 Indy NXT champion, starts 31st for Dale Coyne in his first 500. Romain Grosjean, who walked away from his Haas F1 fireball at Bahrain 2020 and rebuilt his career on American soil, starts 25th in the No. 18 Coyne Honda. None of these three is winning this race, but all three are reasons the broadcast will be worth your attention even when the leaders cycle. Schumacher being on an oval at all is one of the most surreal sentences a Formula 1 fan can read.
Will Power is starting 20th in the No. 26 Andretti Global Honda. Write the previous sentence down because nine months ago it would have sounded insane. Power had been at Team Penske for 17 years. He won the 2018 Indianapolis 500 for them. He won two series championships for them. In the aftermath of the 2025 scandal, the organization chose to dismantle its driver lineup, and Power left for Andretti. He turned 45 in March. He starts 20th with a teammate, Kyle Kirkwood, in 26th, who happens to be his closest threat for the 2026 series championship. Andretti as an organization has been bolstered by Power’s arrival and is dealing with the strangeness of having its title contender (Kirkwood) qualify badly while its rebuilding veteran qualifies badly in a different way. They are not winning Sunday. But Marcus Ericsson, the 2022 Indy 500 winner, is the third Andretti car at 18th. Don’t bet against Ericsson at this track. He has been on the podium twice in three years and the Andretti pit crew under Michael Andretti was the best in the business at managing fuel windows. The current organization, under Dan Towriss now, has retained the people who knew how to do that.
The shadow over the weekend that no one is naming out loud is Josef Newgarden in the No. 2 Penske Chevrolet, who starts 24th. Newgarden won this race in 2023. He won it again in 2024. He was on the verge of being the first driver since Helio Castroneves in 2001 to 2002 to take back-to-back Indianapolis 500s, and the 2024 winning car turned out, in the wash of the 2025 scandal, to have carried the same attenuator modification that got the team caught the next year. He is not banned. He is not disqualified. He is on the grid, in a Penske, starting 24th, and there is no clean way to say this: nobody in the paddock has any idea what to do with that storyline. He is a two-time champion of this race. He may be racing it under a permanent asterisk. The broadcast will mention it once. The 24-second clip from the pre-race interview package will go viral. He will spend the entire race trying to drive through the conversation. Watch his car, because in the right circumstance he wins this thing again, and that becomes the story of the year.
What you should not do is ignore Christian Lundgaard, even though he qualified 19th, because Lundgaard won the Sonsio Grand Prix on the IMS road course nine days ago, in the second McLaren, and is hottest driver in the series right now not named Palou. The 19th-place starting spot is misleading. He had a setup problem on his qualifying run. The race car is faster than the qualifying lap suggested. Picking him for a top-five is not a stretch.
The technical headline beyond hybrid is Firestone. The exclusive tire supplier developed a new race compound specifically for 2026 to compensate for the weight distribution shift the hybrid system imposes on the chassis. Drivers spent practice complaining about understeer when the rear-mounted hybrid mass shifts during corner load. The new compound is softer in the second stint than last year’s spec, which means more grip when the rubber comes in but a faster fall-off when it goes away. Translation: tire management matters more on Sunday than it did last May. Whoever wins this race is going to do it on a long stint of well-managed mid-stint pace, not a hero lap.
Weather. The forecast is dry. High in the mid-80s Fahrenheit. Track surface temperature climbing to 120 degrees by mid-afternoon. Wind from the northeast at 4 miles per hour gusting to 12. There is roughly no chance of rain. That is the cleanest set of race-day conditions Indianapolis has seen in three years, and it removes the safety-car-roulette wild card that decided the 2023 and 2024 finishes. A clean race rewards strategy. That favors the deep teams. That favors Ganassi. That favors Penske. That favors the deep car counts at Andretti and McLaren. That favors Palou.
Now the traditions, because if it’s your first time you should know what you’re looking at when the broadcast goes live. Roughly 30 minutes before the green flag you’ll hear Jim Cornelison sing “Back Home Again in Indiana.” Once is enough. He’s been doing it since 2014 and it raises the hair on the back of your neck every single year. Then the command, given each year by a different luminary, “Drivers, start your engines.” If the broadcast doesn’t cut to a shot of 33 V6 hybrid engines firing simultaneously and you don’t get goosebumps, check that you’re still breathing. The pace laps begin. Three abreast in eleven rows. The pace car is the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X this year, driven by Indiana University football coach Curt Cignetti. When the green flag waves, the field accelerates from a rolling 110 mph to 220+ in roughly four seconds. Watch the wide shot. The pack stays three-wide into Turn 1 every single year and nine times out of ten somebody finds the wall by lap 5. After three hours, when the checkered flag waves, the winner pulls into victory lane in front of the Pagoda and drinks an entire bottle of cold milk. Not champagne. Milk. The tradition dates to 1936 when winner Louis Meyer drank buttermilk after the race because he liked it, and the American Dairy Association has paid the milk fee ever since. Then the winner walks down to the start-finish line, kneels, and kisses the strip of original 1909 bricks that still marks the line. You haven’t been a real fan of this race until you’ve watched a grown man cry while he kisses concrete. Finally, the winner’s face is sculpted onto the Borg-Warner Trophy, a four-foot sterling silver behemoth with the face of every Indianapolis 500 winner since 1936 in raised relief. Castroneves, Dixon, Power, Rossi, Ericsson, Newgarden, Palou. Every winner you can name in the last 25 years is on that trophy in metal. That’s what they’re racing for on Sunday.
So here is how I see this thing going, and the new-fan caveat applies in bold across the top of this paragraph. I am calling my first Indy 500 from the bleachers, not the booth, with one season of consistent IndyCar viewing under my belt and zero on-the-ground reporting hours to draw on. Take the rest of this section as my best read of the field, not as a prediction I would put my house on.
Palou leads the field to green and Rossi follows him through Turn 1. The first stint is clean. Palou paces the field to manage fuel, looking like he’s saving for a punch later. Rosenqvist hangs on his rear wing in third with the Honda pack, and you’ll see the first pit window open around lap 32 when the leaders dive in for fresh Firestones and a top-up of methanol. The cycle is clean. Palou comes out P1. Then the first yellow flag arrives. They always arrive. Three-quarters of Indianapolis 500s in the last decade have had at least three cautions. Somewhere around lap 48, a midfield car (call it Sting Ray Robb on the wrong side of an out-lap, or one of the back-row rookies finding out for the first time what 230 mph feels like with a hot tire), brushes the SAFER barrier in Turn 2 and brings the pace car out. The cycle compresses. The deltas reset.
The second stint is where Pato O’Ward decides he is winning this race. He’s been seventh through twelfth for a year and a half. The McLaren has been a fifth-best car for two of the last three Indy 500s. Not this year. His third stint is the fastest sustained pace anyone runs all afternoon. He passes Malukas on lap 96. He passes Ferrucci on lap 102. By lap 120 he is third and within nine-tenths of a second of Rossi. Palou is still leading because Palou is always still leading. Newgarden, meanwhile, is making the kind of long, patient charge from 24th that an experienced two-time winner makes when he has nothing left to lose. He is in the top ten by lap 110. Whether you cheer for him is a moral question I am not equipped to answer.
The second yellow arrives somewhere between lap 140 and lap 155. It will involve at least one debris call and at least one driver pointing at someone else’s tire that fell off. Pit cycles again. Palou stretches his last stint long. Ganassi has been the best long-stint team at this circuit for a decade and Barry Wanser, Palou’s strategist for all four of his series titles, will have spent practice modeling exactly this restart sequence. With 30 laps to go the field bunches. Rossi is on Palou’s gearbox. O’Ward is on Rossi’s gearbox. The three of them break the field by a full second by lap 175.
Final 20. Hybrid budgets nearly empty. Push-to-pass time remaining around 30 seconds for the leaders. Rossi takes a swing at Palou into Turn 3 on lap 185 and Palou defends, the way he defended Dixon at Long Beach three years ago, by going down to the apex and forcing the inside man to either lift or fade. Rossi fades. O’Ward immediately takes a swing at Rossi for second into Turn 1 on lap 187 and gets the gap. Now it’s Palou with O’Ward filling his mirrors. With ten laps left the third yellow falls (a single-car spin off Turn 4, the driver climbs out unhurt), and the restart sets up a five-lap shootout. Palou leads. O’Ward in second. Rossi in third. They go green with three to go. O’Ward attacks Palou into Turn 1 on the final lap. Palou drives the line he has driven for five hundred miles. O’Ward dives, gets the nose alongside, and runs out of road. Palou crosses the line first by 0.13 seconds.
If that scenario hits, Palou becomes the third driver in this century to win back-to-back Indianapolis 500s, after Castroneves in 2001-2002 and Newgarden in 2023-2024. He drinks the milk. He kisses the bricks. He extends his championship lead. And somewhere, the larger story of motorsport in 2026 (Antonelli running away with Formula 1, Palou running away with IndyCar) becomes the story of two 28-and-under generational drivers in their respective series being measurably better than every other driver in any field at any time.
Palou. O’Ward. Rossi. That is my call, and I am holding it loosely, because I am one season into this sport and have not yet earned the right to plant a flag the way I would on a Sunday at Monaco. Newgarden quietly finishes fifth. Rosenqvist on the podium would surprise nobody, and if he is there instead of Rossi, push him into the top three and bump Rossi to fourth. Castroneves finishes somewhere in the top ten. Schumacher finishes somewhere in the back half of the lead lap and learns more about racing in three hours than he learned in two seasons of Formula 1. The first thing every new IndyCar fan finds out, the only thing that matters when you really start paying attention, is that nothing else in the sports calendar feels like this. Nothing comes close. Welcome to the Yard of Bricks. See you Sunday.
Rudy Falco